There they support commercial fishing in southeast Alaska, British Columbia and Washington, where the geoduck trade got its start. Related species grow from Argentina to New Zealand and Japan, but the largest geoducks reside on North America's Pacific Coast. Those landing on rocky bottoms can grow into gnarled clams with dirty gray siphons those hitting loose sand dig deeper and grow plumper, producing the coveted ivory-colored meat. Within 48 hours, shelled larvae begin swimming weeks later they drop to the seafloor and start digging. Geoducks are broadcast spawners: several times a year, in late winter or early spring, males release sperm in smoky clouds, which causes females to release millions of eggs. Geoducks can reach 14 pounds and live more than 150 years-so long that scientists use rings on the clams' shells to track climate change. While other clams move to avoid predators, a geoduck, when approached by a hungry crab or spiny dogfish, retracts its siphon, like a turtle withdrawing its head. Once buried, a geoduck's shell remains sedentary. Geoducks feed by drawing microscopic creatures called phytoplankton down one side of the neck, and they expel filtered water through the other. Called siphons, these necks, double-barreled like a shotgun, dimple the sand like rows of wheat. Its shell can end up several feet down, with only its neck poking up into the water. The name geoduck comes from the Nisqually Indian gweduc, which means "dig deep." The clam uses a tiny foot to burrow into the seafloor as it grows. What I found was a universe as unusual as Panopea abrupta itself. So I set out to visit some of those whose lives are linked-by occupation or obsession-to this homely creature. The outsize creature somehow provokes outsize behavior: divers swim among sharks to collect it scientists labor over burbling caldrons to grow it detectives track smugglers through night-vision goggles to protect it. Like many Pacific Northwesterners, I'd long been amused and amazed by the geoduck's rise from obscurity to delicacy. The lowly bivalve, it seems, has come out of its shell. A single geoduck can fetch $60 in a Hong Kong fish market. Most of the harvest goes to China, where cooks in Shanghai and Beijing simmer the clams in hot pots. Japanese chefs slice it for sushi and sashimi. Swanky New York bistros serve geoduck with rice wine vinegar. Today Puget Sound fishermen sell four million pounds of it each year, or about two million clams' worth. The neck resembles an aardvark's snout, an elephant's trunk or a monstrous prehistoric earthworm emerging from a fist-size shell, among other things.įorty years ago this mollusk was virtually unknown outside the Northwest. Its long, leathery neck can stretch to the length of a baseball bat or recoil to a wrinkled nub. Wearing a neoprene dry suit, he stood in the boat surrounded by the morning's haul: a glistening payload of an absurdly proportioned shellfish defined by a mass of pudgy, lolling flesh.īuried in the muck beneath Puget Sound lives the Pacific Northwest's most profitable marine creature, a mollusk so valuable that gangsters have traded it for narcotics: the geoduck (pronounced "gooey duck"), the world's largest burrowing clam. Parker's eyes, though, were well trained.
Sixty feet below, where Parker had spent his morning, the seafloor was flat and sandy-barren, to unschooled eyes, except for the odd flounder or orange sea pen. We were anchored 50 yards offshore from a fir-lined peninsula that juts into Puget Sound. Craig Parker popped his head above the surf, peeled off his dive mask and clambered aboard the Ichiban.
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